Asia Pacific will become the largest colo market before 2030, according to a report by real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield.

The region will lead the way on total capacity and rental revenue, the report predicts.

The Asia Pacific Data Centre Investment Landscape paper claims that by 2030, APAC will possess 23,904MW of capacity, overtaking the 18,256MW of expected capacity in the US.

With regards to rental revenue, the report estimates that in 2030, 72 percent of APAC’s annual rent (around $44bn) will be generated by the five largest markets, ranked by descending capacity: Japan, the Chinese mainland, Australia, India, and Malaysia.

Pritesh Swamy, head of insights and analysis at Cushman and Wakefield’s Asia Pacific data center group, said: “Various forecast models show that Asia Pacific will overtake the United States as the largest colocation market in either 2028 or 2029. Based on the population differential, this is expected—but still significant given the depth and maturity of the US market.”

The report also details the current dynamics of the APAC data center market. For example, the amount of people serviced per MW of capacity across APAC – 350,000 – is significantly higher than the US, which services 19,314. In other words, the US has significantly more data center capacity relative to its population than APAC does on average.

That being said, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Malaysia have a lower number of people serviced per MW than the US, but when it comes to determining regional averages, those numbers are greatly offset by the paucity of data centers in Vietnam, the Philippines, India, Indonesia, and the Chinese Mainland relative to their populations.

The report estimates that this density gap between the US and APAC will narrow, with the latter’s population per MW number decreasing to around 158,000 per MW by 2030.

As a whole, APAC possesses a much higher ratio of colocation data centers to total operational data centers than in the Americas or in EMEA – 85 percent, 58 percent and 75 percent respectively – but the report argues that this gap will narrow slightly by 2030 as American hyperscalers rely on colos in order to keep up with demand for cloud and AI services.